The Anti-Crysis: Is DOOM the best optimized PC game ever?

[DeathReborn]

I'd put Minesweeper as possibly the best optimised PC game ever, possibly tied with Solitaire, Freecell & Hearts.

 

[Carfax83]

Doom is exceptionally well optimized and looks great, but it's nowhere near cutting edge. Crysis was.

And I have to say I disagree with those stating that Frostbite 3 is the most cutting edge engine . Unreal Engine 4 is, by far.

 

[3DVagabond]

DICE is owned by EA, a company with very deep pockets. This is what a large R&D budget gets you

And a top dev team. Simply being an EA game doesn't guarantee anything.

 

[Erenhardt]

Doom is not flawless. There are issues with textures streaming.
I feel like on the graphics level BF is better. It had problems on the netcode side, but graphically it is top notch.

 

[dogen1]

Doom is not flawless. There are issues with textures streaming.
I feel like on the graphics level BF is better. It had problems on the netcode side, but graphically it is top notch.

You could argue that's an optimization though(a side effect actually). They wait until they know what's on screen in order to load in only the texture data that's actually needed. This saves a ton of memory.

I wouldn't mind less pop in, but that's probably a difficult problem to solve when the player can turn so quickly.

You're right about Battlefront looking better though.

 

[arandomguy]

Not sure what you mean by the first question. For the second, the game has a foreboding aesthetic, but it's all well lit and dynamic in its lighting, it's not "dark".

What I'm really tackling is the issue of comparing how well optimized a game and its engine is graphically simply based upon fidelity and performance levels without consideration of the other design considerations each game and its engine is tasked with.

Doom and id Tech 6 is optimized for what it is tasked with. If it were required to tackle brightly lit open and dynamic environments, which Crysis/Cryengine and its subsequent iterations were tasked with (among many other different considerations), would it be achieving the its current fidelity and performance levels?

Not all FPS games are similar in terms of visual requirements just like how RTS games are not similar to FPS games. Laymen optimization comparisons do not seem to really consider this.

We can look at a comparison by the same developer with DICE's BF4 and Battlefront. Would Battlefront have the same performance and fidelity level if it were asked to also have BF4s higher player count, more dynamic environments, and heavier particle based effects?

 

[Carfax83]

Doom is not flawless. There are issues with textures streaming.
I feel like on the graphics level BF is better. It had problems on the netcode side, but graphically it is top notch.

If you have texture streaming issues, it's likely because you are using too high a texture setting for your VRAM. I know that nightmare textures requires a GPU with about 6GB of VRAM..

I've played through the game twice already, and the only time I've ever noticed textures streaming in is during the initial load.

 

[hsjj3]

No, I personally don't think so. Better optimized yet was MGS V The Phantom Pain. Even Alien: Isolation was impressively optimized.

 

[bystander36]

If you have texture streaming issues, it's likely because you are using too high a texture setting for your VRAM. I know that nightmare textures requires a GPU with about 6GB of VRAM..

I've played through the game twice already, and the only time I've ever noticed textures streaming in is during the initial load.

There have been at least 2 posts that have shown that both the new 8Gb 1080/1070 and 480 8Gb cards having texture issues in the game. It's just the way the game was coded, apparently.

 

[Piroko]

I'd put Minesweeper as possibly the best optimised PC game ever, possibly tied with Solitaire, Freecell & Hearts.

Nah, Freecell was a mess. Those fancy effects made it run much worse than the other three.

As for DOOM,

Doom is far from the prettiest game ever released, the environments are relatively small, pretty much no physics/interactivity, there are relatively few monsters on the screen, and the developers didn't bother to include support for multi-GPU...

This. As well as very basic AI, very few scripts and I feel like the audio processing (3d positioning) isn't quite up to what Dice has shown with their games.

It's artistically well designed and that can go a long way in making a game look better than it technically is.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

When I think Most Optimized (as in, without time limits), I think of the Source Engine. When Half-Life 2 released in 2004, it was graphically stunning with everything turn up. At the same time, Source-based games allowed most games to run some of the worst hardware, and maintain playable framerates (I remember playing on a GeForce 4 MX 420 at 1024x768 and having smooth gameplay). Having playable framerates on a 2 year old budget GPU based on a 4 year old architecture that was a AAA Title is pretty remarkable in my opinion. Especially given that GPU horsepower was doing 50% gains each gen from node shrinks.

 

[Carfax83]

There have been at least 2 posts that have shown that both the new 8Gb 1080/1070 and 480 8Gb cards having texture issues in the game. It's just the way the game was coded, apparently.

Hmm that's news to me. I played through the game twice, first with a GTX 980 Ti, and second with a GTX 1080, and I never saw any texture streaming issues other than at the initial load..

Might be something else going on there.. Anyway, I was wrong when I said that Doom wasn't cutting edge. It's not cutting edge in the manner of Crysis, but it does have some very impressive technologies. For instance, Doom has one of the best temporal AA solutions I've ever seen, and considering the quality, it's amazing that the performance impact is so minor.

 

[Erenhardt]

Streaming is very subtle.

It packs some serious tech and is well optimized. All in all, one of the best ports by far.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Yeah, the tssaa or something is quite nice. I tried playing at lower than screen resolution for very high fps, and it looks remarkably decent with that on.

 

[bystander36]

Hmm that's news to me. I played through the game twice, first with a GTX 980 Ti, and second with a GTX 1080, and I never saw any texture streaming issues other than at the initial load..

Might be something else going on there.. Anyway, I was wrong when I said that Doom wasn't cutting edge. It's not cutting edge in the manner of Crysis, but it does have some very impressive technologies. For instance, Doom has one of the best temporal AA solutions I've ever seen, and considering the quality, it's amazing that the performance impact is so minor.

I think that just means you don't notice it, which may mean it isn't that big of a deal.

 

[2is]

I think the Battlefield/Dice games are the best looking, best optimized games.

This is pretty close to the truth here IMO. If we simply look at a static screenshot one may disagree, but when you're in a 64 man server on a large map and see all the stuff that's going on at the same time, helicopters, jets, tanks, infantry, rockets, tracers, destructible environments going on all around you, it becomes much more impressive then looking at a screenshot. It pushes both your CPU and GPU. A couple of my build have been centered around a new BF release.

 

[master_shake_]

wasn't the reason crysis was so horrible is because it loaded the entire map?

 

[Joepublic2]

wasn't the reason crysis was so horrible is because it loaded the entire map?

It's not loading the whole map that was the issue (that'll increase your memory usage and video memory usage but that's not an issue as long as you're not swapping to a block device or across the pci-e bus, respectively); I think the main issue was that it didn't have very advanced occlusion culling at the engine level and was drawing large parts of the map that the player couldn't even see from their POV. That, and the geometry for a lot of objects was overly complex IMO. Nothing murders performance quite like draw calls in D3D <12.